The Power of Five Oblivion

great day of wrath has come and who can stand?’ That’s from the Revelation of St John. The end of the world. That’s what’s happening now.”
    Pedro had to move quickly. He could actually feel his strength draining away as the heavy hand of sleep, endless sleep, weighed down on him. The priest refused to stop talking but the words were coming with difficulty. Some of them were slurred. He was sitting with his hands resting on his lap. Only his lips were moving. Very soon he would be dead.
    But Pedro had one advantage over him. He was a healer. For years he had lived in a slum that was filled with poison … that had even been its name. Poison Town. But he had never fallen ill. Without knowing it, his power had kept him safe. It could do the same now. He could turn it on himself.
    “Maybe you and the other Gatekeepers could save us, just as you saved Maria,” the priest continued. “But don’t you see? I could not let that happen . We have to accept all the things that occur in the world as the will of the Almighty and it is only through our faith that we will survive them. If five children suddenly turn up and use ungodly powers to save humanity, what do you think will be the result? It will be the end of the Christian church. We will have failed! All the faith, everything that we have constructed over the last two thousand years, will come tumbling down. Do you understand? There can only be one Saviour and it is not you.”
    First, Pedro had to get some of the poison out of himself. That was the important thing. He needed water but there was no tap in the room. Then he remembered. There it was, right in front of him … the vase of flowers. It took all his strength to reach out and grab hold of it. With one hand he dragged out the flowers. They were already dying. Like him! The water inside the vase was green and slimy. That was good. Pedro tilted it back and poured the contents down his throat. It tasted revolting. A few pieces of slime caught between his teeth.
    “What are you doing, Pedro?” the priest demanded. His voice was a whisper.
    Pedro ignored him. The filthy water had done exactly what he wanted. He felt nauseous and a moment later he twisted round in his chair and was violently sick. He actually felt all the contents of his stomach empty themselves. Surely they must have taken at least some of the poison with them.
    “No!” Silvio was looking at him in dismay.
    Pedro ignored him. Perhaps he was imagining it but he was sure that some of the taste of the poison had already left him. He jerked forward, propelling himself out of the chair and onto his knees. Now he was right in front of the antique mirror. He could see his own reflection. He looked terrible, completely white, sweating, his eyes staring back at him. He focused on the reflection, imagining that it wasn’t him but Matt after the Nazca Desert, Scott in Vilcabamba, just another sick person that he had to heal. He tried to feel the power flowing through him, rebounding on himself.
    “You cannot save yourself!”
    “I will save myself!”
    And Pedro knew that it was working, that there was something inside him fighting back and winning. It was an extraordinary sensation, his own power curing him.
    “God help me…!” They were the last words spoken by the priest. He slumped back in his chair, his eyes closed.
    Pedro didn’t dare move. He remained on his knees, his hands pressed against the glass of the mirror. He was still there many hours later when the sun began to rise.

OBLIVION

FORTY-FIVE
    There was nowhere in the world that was anything like it.
    The ice shelf was as flat and as desolate as it was possible to be. It was almost two kilometres long and half a kilometre wide, narrowing to a point, with a range of mountains rising up, black and impenetrable, at the far end. It was from these mountains that the ice had come, part of a glacier that had oozed and crawled its way forward a few centimetres at a time over hundreds of years. The ice shelf widened out until it reached the edge of a cliff, which formed a straight line, as if it were the end of the world. From here, there was a hundred-metre drop down to a thin strip of beach, hammered endlessly by the icy-grey water of the Southern Ocean.
    The cliff face had been sliced and sculpted by the weather. It might once have been nothing more than a solid wall. But the wind and the sea-spray had worked with infinite care, turning it into a frozen firework display of